Personally, I can't stand violence. In any standard American mainstream movie, there's 20 times more violence than in any one of my films, so I don't know why those directors aren't asked why they're such specialists for violence.

Of course, we avoid death. To know something is inevitable is one thing. To accept, to truly feel it... that's different.

The difficulty, then, is when you create a church, an institution, and you create a dogma. When you create an ideology, that's the danger. Communism, too, is a beautiful idea, but millions of people died when communism became an ideology.

Usually music is used to hide a film's problems.

It became a gamble to myself whether I was able to do the exact same film ["Funny Games"]under very different circumstances.

Of course I am a child of European culture. There are a number of great directors from which I learned, but there is nobody in particular I got inspired from.

The film [the white Ribbon] does try to use German Fascism as an example, but not specifically Fascism... the results of German Fascism. It shows how people are prepared or indoctrinated for an ideology... people who are already in a state of repression who have been humiliated by society and who clasp at a straw that's offered to them. And how that's then developed into a form of indoctrination.